A panel of six current and former New York Times China correspondents discuss their careers of covering China yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Seymour Topping, Fox Butterfield, Nicholas Kristof, Elisabeth Rosenthal, Joseph Kahn, and Edward Wong - join moderator Orville Schell in a lively discussion marking the launch of Asia Society's new website ChinaFile.

Fox Butterfield

Fox Butterfield is an American journalist who covered China between 1979 and 1981 for The New York Times.

Joseph Kahn

Joseph Kahn is the foreign editor of The New York Times. He was Beijing bureau chief at the Times between 2003 and 2007.

Nicholas Kristof

Nicholas Kristof writes op-ed columns for the New York Times. His columns have often focused on global health, poverty, and gender issues in the developing world. Since 2004, he has written dozens of columns about Darfur and visited the area eight times.

He has received two Pulitzer Prizes, one for his reporting with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, on China's Tiananmen Square democracy movement and the other for his reporting on Darfur. He has been a Times correspondent since 1984, becoming an associate managing editor and the first blogger on the New York Times Web site.

Kristof has lived on four continents, reported on six, and traveled to 120 countries, all 50 states, every Chinese province, and every main Japanese island. Kristof and WuDunn are authors of China Wakes: The Struggle for the Soul of a Rising Power and Thunder from the East: Portrait of a Rising Asia.

Elisabeth Rosenthal

Elisabeth Rosenthal writes for The New York Times specializing in epidemic disease, and scientific and environmental matters. She covered China between 1979-1981 for the Times.

Orville Schell

Orville Schell, Arthur Ross Director of the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations, is an author, journalist, and former Dean and Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He has written widely for many magazine and newspapers, including the Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, Time, the New Republic, Harpers, the Nation, the New York Review of Books, Wired, Foreign Affairs, the China Quarterly, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. Schell is a Fellow at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University, a Senior Fellow at the Annenberg School of Communications at USC and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Seymour Topping

Seymour Topping joined the Associated Press in 1948 as a foreign correspondent in China and Southeast Asia. He then joined The New York Times Company in 1959. During his tenure there, he served in multiple positions such as chief correspondent in both Moscow and Southeast Asia, foreign editor, managing editor, and director of editorial development.

Edward Wong

Edward Wong is a correspondent in the Beijing bureau of The New York Times. Since 2008, he has covered Chinese politics, economics, the military, foreign policy, the environment, culture and a range of other issues. He has been a writer on three in-depth series that explored China’s growing global reach, cultural production and censorship, and the 2012 leadership transition. Since being posted to China, he has also reported from countries across Asia, including Afghanistan, North Korea and Myanmar. Wong has worked for The Times for more than 13 years and spent a decade overseas. His first foreign assignment for the newspaper was in the Baghdad bureau, where he covered the Iraq War from 2003 to 2007. Between his Iraq and China assignments, he studied Mandarin at Middlebury College and at Taiwan University. Wong first went to China in 1996, when he studied at Beijing Language and Culture University. Wong has also written often on travels in the Himalayas. Wong has received the Livingston Award for his coverage of Iraq and shared in an award from the Society of Publishers in Asia for coverage of China. He has a Bachelor’s degree in English literature from the University of Virginia and dual Master’s degrees in journalism and international studies from the UC Berkeley.